I grafted my answer to the wrong post, I meant to respond to the guy talking about the project implicitely using Numpy.
Offtopic remark: It would be nice to be able to move a post to a different thread, or make a single answer to several messages.
Always surprises me that out of all the different kinds of internet communities, it's only the oft-maligned imageboards that consistently provide that feature.
I was kind of expecting Discourse to play with the idea, since they seem to be the modern-reboot-of-forums with the most traction + willingness to experiment, but they haven't so far, afaik.
The naïve solution would be to just limit nesting and order nested comments chronologically. Another solution may be to CC @postid in your messages and have posts display "responding to: id1, id4" at the top and "responses: id91" at the bottom with appropriate links. There's a question here about which post to write or display your response under. Finally, an extravagant solution would be to really represent discussion as a graph and I think a lot of time would need to be spent creating an interface with minimal frustration as I feel it can get really involved (i.e., a lot of clicking).
Curious what you or anyone else thinks.